Evelyn Williams at her 1996 exhibition, Encounters, showing the relationship between the artist and her younger self. Photograph: Don McPhee for the Guardian

The artist Evelyn Williams has died aged 83. Hardly a day in her working life was not spent, in part or whole, in her calm and quiet studio in Finsbury Park, north London. On her easel, a matter of weeks before her death, was an ambitious image of an effulgent ruby red flowering shrub. From her earliest drawings, vision, dream and reality combined; she characterised her work as "inner thoughts, other worlds".

She proved hard to categorise and for some the preoccupations left them cold. Maybe the band of female abstract artists who are her contemporaries have had more acceptance than her obstinate figuration. Williams should certainly be regarded, along with friends such as Paula Rego, as having forged a path for female artists. She later founded a trust in her name which has done modest but important work to support artists, particularly women, and the practice of drawing.

Evie, as she was known, was born in London, the second daughter of Jenny, a career-orientated opera singer, and Brendan Williams, a radical Welsh writer. She was packed off to AS Neill's progressive Summerhill school in Suffolk at not quite three and did not talk until she was four. She lived with an acute sense of vulnerability and in her adult life placed a tremendous value on familial love.

From the age of 15, she studied at St Martin's School of Art and then went to the Royal College of Art, working alongside the older, largely male students, many of them soldiers returning from service in the second world war. When these men started making their way in the world through such focal points as the John Moores exhibition, there, in 1961, was this pesky Evelyn Williams winning the sculpture prize with a work entered as a collage.

Her career was punctuated by shows of scale. There was a retrospective, as early as 1973, at the Whitechapel, when critics were already struggling to characterise her powerful, affecting, but for the times, not mainstream art. Her large-scale reliefs were shown at Riverside Studios in 1984 and the Out of the Forest exhibition at the Graves Gallery (1990) marked the transition away from the work on reliefs to large drawings and gradually more paintings, some of a scale comparable to the reliefs.

She permanently damaged her back working on monumental reliefs such as All Night Through (1984), now in the refectory of Murray Edwards (formerly New Hall) College, Cambridge. Exhibitions at the Mead Gallery, Coventry (1994), and at Manchester Art Gallery (1996) were marked by singular, visionary pictures.

In recent years there were exhibitions through Martin Tinney in Wales and with Agnew's and Jane England in London. These works were often intimate and startling and although the paint became thinner, the power of imagination remained true to an unfolding world of figures in interiors or passing through increasingly deserted landscapes of woods and plains. She talked of her work with self-effacement but her words provide epitaphs: "After all the attempts at movement, the pulling and pushing of forms, the agitation – here all goes still and I have a sense of relief the figure is asleep and has found rest."

Anthony Perry, her second husband, collected in a book the thoughts of people who have lived with Evie's work on their walls over the years. It is an eloquent testimony of the solace, humour and power that people found in their daily encounters with her work.

She is survived by Anthony, whom she married in 1963, and their daughter, Sarah; by her daughter, Emma, from her earlier marriage to the painter Michael Fussell, which ended in divorce; and by nine grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.